Playing with Fragment App

I’ve been playing a bit with the Fragment App on my iPhone (available for Android too) lately and I thought it would be fun to share it with you today. An interesting app created by Pixite, Fragment allows you to turn your mobile photos into abstract works of art by adding geometric shapes, lines and patterns. It’s like putting your photo through an electronic prism of sorts. Really, check it out…

When you first open the app you will see a page that allows you to choose whether to continue to edit your last photo, take or import a new photo, or go to a page of “inspiration”–a collection of Fragmented images from other users that will give you ideas about what this app can do for you!

If you hit the “info” circle on the top right of the screen it will take you to a little overview about how to navigate the app. Once you’ve used it a couple times it’s very user friendly, it just takes a little practice and some trial and error to understand all the functionality.

To give you a sense of what Fragment can do, I decided to run this self-portrait through the app to see what I could make of it…

Once you’ve opened a photo you can choose your fragment from the different “packs”, which are the shape icons along the bottom of the screen (see screenshots below). Fragment comes loaded with the Classics Volumes 1 and 2, and you can also purchase other packs in app if you desire. The buttons just below the photo in the center are presets that allow you to control the position, rotation and scale of both your original photo as well as the fragmented pieces of your photo. If the presets don’t give you enough variety and freedom, you can also control with your fingers–drag one finger to move the pieces around and pinch with two fingers to zoom in and out and twist to rotate.

You can toggle back and forth between editing your image and editing the fragment using the circle at the top of the screen. When it’s yellow you’ll be editing your fragment and when it’s blue you are editing your photo (sounds confusing, but when you see it in action, it’s not). There is also a randomize button (double arrows on the right towards the bottom) which I don’t usually use in any apps, but it’s worth trying here to get a sense of just how creative this app can be.

Once you are satisfied with your fragment shape and placement you can tap on the triangle at the bottom to reveal some additional editing options–brightness, contrast, additive, blur, invert, and desaturate. Along the bottom of the screen you will see a number dial and a color dial. Moving the number dial to the negative numbers on the left applies the effect to the fragment, and moving the dial to the right to the positive numbers applies the effect to the main image.

So below you can see I desaturated the original photo to black and white while leaving the segments inside the fragment with the original blue hue. I also used the blur effect inside the fragment but left the original photo in focus. Making sense?

I like this version above, but I wanted to show you that you can also add layers by “refragmenting” a photo multiple times.

After playing around with the options you see above I settled on this simple version. I liked the placement and size of my fragment but I wanted to remove some of it from my photo. Since Fragment does not let you do that, I took the photo into one of my favorite apps, Superimpose, and masked off part of the fragment that I didn’t like (the part covering my right hand near the center of the photo). So now I’ve got this, which I don’t think is my final image. I’m done with Fragment but I’ll need to run it through a few more apps to play around before I’m satisfied. Or maybe I’ll leave it like this. We’ll see…

Before I go I wanted to share a couple more examples of what Fragment can do. You may remember Angie Dornier from her Jar of Inspiration guest post last year. Well she’s still challenging herself with that project and this month’s draw was diptychs. She reached out to a bunch of photo friends and asked if we could each submit a photo to her that she would then use as inspiration for the second half of a diptych. I sent her the photo on the left and clued her in that I used Fragment. Check out her image on the right…she totally nailed it!

I have only begun to harness this app’s power! Angie referred to Fragment as “infinitely configurable which is both amazing and maddening at the same time”. I could not have said it better myself. In case I’m not doing it justice or not explaining it right check out this video from the makers of the app themselves. It was free last week but I think it has gone back to its original price of $1.99 (sorry).

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